Looking for where to save time in projects, lessons from container revolution

Long before I worked in data centers, information warehouses, I used to work in physical warehouses for HP and Apple as a distribution engineer.  Pallets, forklifts, boxes, bar codes, and processes were what I worked with every day.  When containers arrived to data centers so many people made a big deal of it, but I had seems containers used over 30 years go to move massive quantities of goods and having containers to encapsulate IT white space is interesting, but not even close to as revolutionary containers were to the shipping industry. 

The Economist has an article on Containers where they discuss how innovative containers were.

Innovation

Big bills left in the shipping container

May 20th 2013, 21:16 by R.A. | WASHINGTON

I LOVE the history of the shipping container. Nothing could be more confounding to our usual ideas about innovation, stagnation, and technology.

And Contaners were a simple idea created by the execs not some whiz kid.

Except that's not how it works out. And not because an inventor came up with a revolutionary new technology. Instead, a few savvy shipping magnates figured out a better way to do things. A much, much better way.

The new system was simple. Customers or aggregating shipping firms would pack their cargo into giant, purpose-designed metal boxes. The boxes could be loaded on truck or rail trailers for transport to port, where purpose-built cranes would swing them onto purpose-built boats that don't carry anything but containers. Cargo could travel from factory to destination without ever being handled by a human. 

When you feel like there aren't any interesting opportunities turn around take a look behind you.  There may be some really good opportunities in your past that you didn't see.

Obviously container shipping revolutions don't come along every day. But I find this history to be a powerful antidote to economic pessimism. It's as if humanity faced a stand of trees stripped of low-hanging fruit and despaired of further economic gain, only to have someone shout, "Hey, there are also a bunch of trees behind us!"

The Perfect Data Center

Dilbert's Scott Adams has a blog post on the Perfect Room and piece of SW that could support this.

You often see rooms that can't be furnished properly because furniture placement was an afterthought. The design of a room should start with the perfect arrangement of furniture and fixtures. I would think that for every budget and set of preferences there are a few furniture arrangements that stand out as the best. How hard would it be to catalog those best arrangements?

I imagine a time when a user can design a home simple by checking boxes on a long digital form. Questions for a living room might include:

1.      Do you want a TV in this room?
2.      Do you want a cozy reading chair?
3.      Do you want a fireplace?
4.      Etc.

Once the user selects all of his preferences for each room, he clicks a "shuffle" button and it spits out a house layout complete with external windows, doors, hallways, stairs, and engineering support structures. All of that stuff is fairly rules-based. If you don't like the first design, click the shuffle button again. In every case, the rooms will have exactly the features you specified but arranged differently. And of course you can walk through your model in 3D mode.

Scott closes with points on the savings and the issues.

1.      Rooms that need plumbing should be near each other to reduce costs.
2.      Orientation to the sun makes a huge difference in heating/cooling/insulation.
3.      Some designs require fewer hallways, which saves space.
4.      Some designs require more support structures, doors, windows, etc.
5.      Some designs have ductwork issues.

Those are just some obvious examples of potential savings. You'd also cut your architect expense by 80%. And you'd save on labor and materials because the building materials would be measured and cut at the factory, including everything from lumber to floor tiles to carpet.

My observation is that the building industry is slow to innovate and fairly disorganized. Builders, architects, and materials companies are all their own little silos. So my guess is that the "shuffle design" program will originate in some sort of online game environment before it gets ported to the real world.

i think this is what Compass Data Centers is attempting to do.

If you’ve ever sat behind a foul pole at a baseball game you know what a pain columns can be. That’s why your 10,000 square feet of 36” raised floor is column free. At Compass, your data center floor accommodates anything from a tape library or a Cisco 7000 with side-to-side airflow to OpenCompute’s new larger rack sizes. This degree of flexibility even extends to cable management to support your preference whether its above the rack, hanging from the ceiling, or below the floor. At Compass, the only option you don’t have is to strand your IT capacity.

Speaking of your data center floor flexibility, can you control how much the software uses of the server and storage capacity? We didn’t think so. The reality of the world is that most software does not drive the full use of the server (virtualized or otherwise). As a result, it’s tough to predict what your actual usage will be from rack-to-rack. Not to mention the patch, network and storage…That’s why your Compass solution will support rack densities that cover the spectrum up to 20kW without containment (from 0 to 400 W/sf). Just imagine what you can do using ASHRAE TC 9.9 best practices including containment.

Although perfection is hard to achieve as once you live in the space you find out things you didn't consider.

Modular Construction moving forward, present and past

Found this Construction article on Modular Construction.  I found it interesting because it discusses the past and present.

While modular building dates back at least a century, it gained national attention as troops returned home after World War II, when it became the preferred building method for housing in rural and suburban settings across the United States.

The 1960s and 1970s gave rise to more complicated designs as consumer demands became more sophisticated, and in the 1980s, even more intricate modular homes began to take shape across the Northeast, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and, to a lesser degree, New York.

“The New Jersey suburbs are full of beautiful, custom-designed houses that were executed in modular factories,” Mr. O’Hara said.

Slowly, modular seeped into the commercial industry, becoming popular for building low- to mid-rise structures—affordable housing, hospitals and other medical facilities, schools and office complexes—with companies like Capsys, Deluxe Building Systems and NRB among those paving the way in the Northeast.

Note:  in the above the O'Hara quoted is not me.  My name is Ohara, but people stick an apostrophe in my name all the time.  Makes it a really pain for medical records reconciliation.

The construction industry can be slow to change, and a recent project may help to change the perception.

Proponents of the method have treated modular design as gospel for years, and real estate industry professionals (even those not directly involved in modular building) agree that the cost and time savings afforded in smaller-scale projects translates into larger, taller buildings.

“It’s one of the best-kept secrets in the real estate industry, but I think that this building will change that,” said Amy Marks, owner and president of XSite Modular, the modular consultant on the Atlantic Yards project. “If you’re building a building today and not considering some sort of modular or prefab, you’re missing out on a tremendous value.”

Modular is not anything new, but not used by all.

But most agree that incorporating at least certain elements of modular design is beneficial, with firms across the city opening up to the idea.

Compass Data Center achieves Funding milestone, $45 mil for first round

Compass Data Centers in trying to be different than the rest, and part of building something different takes money.  Today, Compass Data Centers announced funding.

Compass Datacenters Completes First Major Round if Funding

 

 

 

For Immediate Release

$45 Million Dollar Credit Facility is Expandable to $100 Million; Will Finance Data Center Construction Projects Across United States

Dallas – September 4, 2012 – Compass Datacenters has completed its first major round of financial funding: a $45 million credit facility with an accordion feature up to $100 million from KeyCorp’s commercial finance unit, KeyBank, NA. This is the company’s first formal round of funding since the company began operations earlier this year, and it will be used to finance its aggressive growth plan over the coming months.

Compass convinced its financier that its business model will work.

“Compass Datacenters is pioneering a major area of growth for the data center industry by offering wholesale standalone data center products that meet the needs of companies that are in geographic areas that are not well served by traditional providers. They have assembled a strong management team comprised of executives with proven track records in data centers and real estate development. Their wholesale business model and proprietary design architecture have the company positioned to be the leader in this growth market,” said John Murphy, Managing Director of Real Estate Capital at KeyBank.

Next step is to see data centers build by Compass which should happen quickly with a modular design.

Monitoring a Container Data Center Solution, HP shows OSIsoft implementation

Containers are popular with almost all data center solution providers.  Part of the modular approach is a consistent way to monitory the data center infrastructure.

HP gave a presentation on its solution at OSIsoft's user conference and you can see the presentation here.

Here are few slides that gives you an idea of what was presented.